Le 20 juin 2006 à 6:53, Robert O'Callahan a écrit :
I would also like to see a complete description of the CSS
extensions required for real high-quality rendering.
I can't claim this is complete, but two ideas come to my mind right now:
1. Some "border-character" property, which would work mostly like
CSS 3's
border-image, but would put a stretchable character in the
border. The
browser would be in charge of stretching. "border-image" with
SVG could
be an adequate substitute for some characters, but I'm not sure
it would
be so great with braces or arrows.
2. Some people have suggested various handy text-transforms for maths,
like math-italic, math-bold, and math-bold-italic that would change
Latin an Greek characters to their appropriate mathematical
variants in
Unicode.
These improvements would make possible a much better rendering of
White's markup proposal. Maybe he could suggest some other improvements.
Personally, there are things in his markup I don't like but which are
necessary to have a correct rendering under CSS 2.1. If CSS could be
smarter, the markup could be better and more logical, so I'd like to
suggest this too:
3. It would help to be able to set the vertical alignment relative
to the
height of the previous element's height. It would allow a markup
like
this to be used for exponents
<fence> ... </fence><sup>2</sup>
<matrix>...</matrix><sup>2</sup>
instead of the complicated structure required by White's
proposal. I
do not have a clear idea of a CSS syntax to accomplish this
however.
4. In the same reasoning, it would be great if there was a way adjacent
elements could share the same horizontal space, like <sup> and
<sub>
when they are next to each other:
C<sup>1</sup><sub>2</sub>
I'm thinking of something which I would call "inline-float" (for
the lack of a better name), which would make two or more elements
with that property collapse into the same horizontal space when
they are following directly each other and are not overlapping
vertically.
It would have some uses outside mathematic formulas too. I'm
thinking
of chemistry which could would benefit of a better rendering for:
SO<sub>3</sub><sup>2-</sup>
(Example from Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion>)
I'd also add that better support for combining diacritics in Unicode,
designed to stack over each other, would be great for maths too. But
this is not in the scope of CSS, I think.
Michel Fortin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.michelf.com/
